Quotes about fog
page 2

“And You surround me, You're pretty but You're all I can see,
Like a thick fog…
If there was no way into God,
I would never have laid in this grave of a body for so long.”

Aaron Weiss

Carousels.
Catch For Us The Foxes (2004)

God, Way

“When I crashed my BMW and managed to walk away pretty much unscathed, it was a turning point. I'd been living the life, and when people see photos of the car wreck, they can't believe I got away with it. It was like a fog had lifted. I stopped drinking a bottle of Tequila before grabbing my car keys. It was time to wise-up and get a haircut.”

Johnny Marr (1963) musician

from " The Smiths: Johnny Marr looks back http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/the-smiths-johnny-marr-looks-back-526130.html", The Independent (24 February 2006).

Life, People, Cars, Photo

“I used to be a folk singer, but I was… dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog.”

Billy Connolly (1942) British comedian

An Audience With Billy - 1985

“I am hard at work, at least I work as much as the weather permits. - I began a work the motif of which is the river bank in the direction of St. Paul's Church. Looking towards Rouen I have before me all the houses on the quays lighted by the morning sun, in the background the stone bridge, to the left the island with its houses, factories, boats, launches, to the right a mass of pinnaces of all colors… Yesterday, not having the sun, I began another work on the same motif in grey weather, only I looked more to the right [603]. I must leave you for my motif. I have a room on the street. I shall start on a view of the street in fog for it has been foggy every morning until eleven o'clock—noon. It should be interesting, the square in the fog, the tramways, the goings and comings..”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter, Rouen 11 October 1883, to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 40
1880's

Color, Light, Sun, Housing

“I recently flew more than twelve thousand miles in a little over a month, through rain, fog, wind and snow, over mountains, cities and deserts, in a three-year-old, second-hand airplane that had already traveled some five hundred thousand miles. During that time I never was very late for an appointment or put a single scratch on myself. And considering that I am hardly an expert pilot at nineteen years of age, I knew that these statements must prove something about modern commercial aviation.”

Eddie August Schneider (1911–1940) American aviator

[Look Out, Lindbergh - Here I Come, Flying magazine, http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Eddie_August_Schneider_September_1931_Flying_magazine_page_1_of_4.png, September 1, 1930, Eddie August Schneider]

Age, Travel, Mountain, Time

“That same night I went into the chicken coop, took my hooked knife which I used to pit peaches with, and carved her initials on the back side of my left hand … JA. Jane Addison. My first true love. The original Miss It. I was in such a fog that I forgot to cover it with a glove or something. At supper, right in front of my mother, my brother Bob said in a loud voice, “What’s that on your hand?” I pretended not to hear. I quickly switched my fork to my right hand and put my left hand under the table. “Hey, mom. Oscar cut himself,” the bastard said. “What?””

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

she cried out. She couldn’t stand violence unless it was part of some beating to teach me respect.
Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 89.

Love, Moms, Parting, Night

“Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' — The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' — Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Big Sur (1962)

Men, Drink, Thinking, Sister

“When you can see through the fog for an instant, and you understand haltingly and briefly what good is, and how God is connected with that, it cannot help but put a hell of a perspective on things you perceive as problems, and help you discover multiple ways in which you have been numb. For that brief moment you feel that God's in His heaven and all's right with the world.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary

God, World, Way, Feeling

“Sadly, Pat Tillman lost his life in the fog of war in Afghanistan, in combat, as an Army Ranger. He lived the motto of the U. S. Army Rangers, “Rangers lead the way.” He also embodied the motto of the U. S. Army, “This we’ll defend.””

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Folks, you’re missing the point about the NFL protests (19 October 2017)

Life, War, Way

“No lover in any language, and certainly no poet, has confessed to missing the mark more often than Dafydd ap Gwilym. Uncooperative husbands, quick-triggered alarms, crones and walls, strong locks, floods and fogs and bogs and dogs are for ever interposing themselves between him and golden-haired Morfudd, black-browed Dyddgu, or Gwen the infinitely fair. But a great trier, even in church.”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

Gwyn Jones, in The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English (Oxford: OUP, 1977) p. 289.
Criticism

Dogs, Lovers, Strong

“With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless. “I am addicted to comfort,” I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips. I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit. We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins. What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose? The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Life, God, Peace, Food

“I am now engaged on the refutation of Luther's book, which refutation you will see about September 1st. I am indeed wholly averse to this kind of fighting; but what do they think is to be done by him who is attacked with edge and point? Do not all believe that in repelling an enemy he is to be kept away, and if this is to be accomplished in no other way, he is to be cut down? And must we not oppose engines to those battering-rams which caus enot theology but faith adn truth to be overthrown, friendship to perish, and whatever is sacred and in moderation to be held in contempt among mortals? That book of Luther's, what else is it than an example of denying what you a little while ago? or a fog through which you cannot see rightly the mystery of Christ? I shall put forth nothing wild against Luther - a thing hehimself ought not to have done. Since he has done it I shall remember piety and Christian decorum.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter, July 21, ibid, p.288

Friendship, Truth, Books, Faith

“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Harry Hubbard, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)

Winter

“People ask the way to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain? There is no road that goes through.
Even in summer the ice doesn't melt;
Though the sun comes out, the fog is blinding.
How can you hope to get there by aping me?
Your heart and mine are not alike.
If your heart were the same as mine,
Then you could journey to the very center!”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan

People, Hope, Way, Mountain

“He is walking up an incline. There are tracks below him and the slow clatter of a freight, the hiss of an engine. At the top of a hill he stops to look back. He can see nothing but fog spaced with a file of blurred archlights. Then he walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat of his blood, in the tread of his feet on the pavement, between rows of otherworldly frame houses. Gradually the fog thins, a morning pearliness is seeping in from somewhere. Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dumping grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly through the mist on rusty donkey-engines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless masses of corroding metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out of the smell. He is hungry; his shoes are beginning to raise blisters on his big toes. At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and winks, is a gasoline station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three cents for good luck, or bad luck for that matter. A huge furniture truck, shiny and yellow, has drawn up outside.
"Say will you give me a lift?" he asks the redhaired man at the wheel.
"How fur ye goin?"
"I dunno.... Pretty far."”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), pp. 403-404

Bad luck, Pleasure, Shoe, Light

“Summer fog. It leached all color and substance from the world, leaving only grays. Lead gray tombstone gray cobweb gray ash gray snot gray dust gray corpse gray. It was unheard-of that there be fog at this time of the year, late August. So it had to be another portent — as dire a one as the death of the One-Handed Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapor, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this wide-spreading shroud over the Many-Colored Land.”

Julian May (1931–2017) American science fiction, fantasy, horror, science and children's writer

The Adversary (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), ISBN 0-395-34410-7, p. 19 (opening lines of chapter 1)

Death, World, Color, Fashion

“[I have] all respect for that neoclassicism [of Piet Mondrian ], but it would sacrifices me too much to architecture. That kind of art does indeed fit perfectly in very modern rooms of modern buildings in equally modern cities, but never again a handcart can drive in there and never again someone can speak or think of a white dog cart in the fog. I am longing for a painting that can hang in a modern environment and still have its 'personal' life.”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): Al mijn respect voor dat neo-klassicisme [van Mondriaan], maar dat offert me teveel aan de architectuur. Dat werk past inderdaad gegoten in zeer moderne vertrekken van moderne gebouwen in even moderne steden maar er kan dan nooit meer een stootkar in rijden en nooit kan nog iemand spreken of denken aan een witte hondenkar in de mist. Ik verlang een schilderij die kan hangen in een moderne omgeving en die toch een ‘eigen’ leven heeft.
Quote of Raveel, in a letter to his friend Hugo Claus, from Machelen aan de Leie, after February 1951; as cited in Hugo Claus, Roger Raveel; Brieven 1947 – 1962, ed. Katrien Jacobs, Ludion; Gent Belgium, 2007 - ISBN 978-90-5544-665-0, p. 133 (translation: Fons Heijnsbroek)
1945 - 1960

Life, Dogs, Art, Thinking

“An errant ray from the immortal Mind
Accepted the earth's blindness and became
Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.
An exile, labourer on this unsure globe
Captured and driven in Life's nescient grasp,
Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,
It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,
The natural privilege of unfallen gods,
Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.
Amidst earth's mist and fog and mud and stone
It still remembers its exalted sphere
And the high city of its splendid birth.”

Sri Aurobindo book Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol

Savitri (1918-1950), Book Two : The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds

Life, God, Dreams, Birth

“If I love you—
I never behave like a climbing trumpet vine
Using your high branches to show myself off;
If I love you—
I never mimic infatuated little birds
Repeating monotonous songs into the shadows,
Nor do I look at all like a wellspring
Sending out its cooling consolation all year round,
Or just another perilous crag
Augmenting your height, setting off your prestige.
Nor like the sunlight
Or even spring rain.
No, these are not enough.
I would be a kapok tree by your side
Standing with you—
both of us shaped like trees.
Our roots hold hands underground,
Our leaves touch in the clouds.
As a gust of wind passes by
We salute each other
And not a soul
Understands our language.
You have your bronze boughs and iron trunk
Like knives and swords,
Also like halberds;
I have my red flowers
Like heavy sighs,
Also like heroic torches.
We share cold waves, storms and thunderbolts;
Together we savor fog, haze and rainbows.
We seem to always live apart,
But actually depend upon each other forever.
This has to be called extraordinary love.
Faith resides in it:
Love—
I love not only your sublime body
But the space you occupy,
The land beneath your feet.”

Shu Ting (1952) Chinese writer

"To the Oak Tree" [ 致橡树 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APZjf9K6KX0, Zhi xiangshu] (27 March 1977), in The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry Since the Cultural Revolution, ed. Edward Morin, trans. Fang Dai and Dennis Ding (University of Hawaii Press, 1990), ISBN 978-0824813208, pp. 102–103.

Love, Faith, Soul, Spring

“"The consciousness of the darkness in one and around one brings the longing for light. And then the light dawns; through mist and fog, perhaps, but enough to pick one's way by." He stopped a moment and then added, "and shines ever brighter unto the perfect day."”

Thomas Hughes book Tom Brown at Oxford

Source: Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Ch. 50

Way, Light, Perfection

“You are a mystery in an enigma in a big ball of fur,
An irresistible magnet to every child and flea and burr.
Your nose is high-resolution while I live in a near-scentless fog
You run at high speed, while I just have to slog (but it's a good ol' slog)
So I just want to thank you for being my dog….”

Richard Summerbell (1956) Canadian mycologist

(Thank You For Being) My Dog, 2004.

Dogs, Speed

“The assumption that, beneath economics, reality is psychosexual is often rejected as ahistorical by those who accept a dialectical materialist view of history because it seems to land us back where Marx began: groping through a fog of utopian hypotheses, philosophical systems that might be right, that might be wrong (there is no way to tell); systems that explain concrete historical developments by a priori categories of thought; historical materialism, however, attempted to explain 'knowing' by 'being' and not vice versa.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Way, History, Reality

“I don't have credibility, I'm a comedian. I'm not Ed Murrow up on the roof in a London fog reporting on the blitz.”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

Associated Press interview (26 January 2004) http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/26/tv.dennismiller.ap/

“San Francisco, I believe, has the most disagreeable climate and locality of any city on the globe. If the winter be not unusually wet, there is some delightful weather to be enjoyed. If it be, you are flooded, and the rainy season closes to give place to what is miscalled summer — a season so cold that you require more clothing than you did in January; so damp with fogs and mists that you are penetrated to the very marrow; so windy that if you are abroad in the afternoon it is a continual struggle. Your eyes are blinded, your teeth set on edge, and your whole person made so uncomfortable by the sand that has insinuated itself through your clothing, that you could not conceive it possible to feel a sensation of comfort short of a warm bath and shower.... What sort of end the unfortunates, who spend their lives there, can expect under such circumstances, one does not easily foresee.”

Eliza Farnham (1815–1864) American novelist, feminist, abolitionist, and activist for prison reform

California, In-doors and Out (1856)

Feeling, Winter, Summer, Personality

“Below us the breakers flayed the land with white fists. They retreated and came back to flay it again. As each breaker retreated, the shoreline broke into an ever-widening grin. We coasted in second down the spiral road, the black pavement perspiring, fog tongues licking it. the air was so clean. We breathed it gratefully. There was no dust here.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“Hey where did we go,
Days when the rains came
Down in the hollow,
Playin' a new game,
Laughing and a running hey, hey
Skipping and a jumping
In the misty morning fog with
Our hearts a thumpin' and you
My brown eyed girl,
You my brown eyed girl.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Brown Eyed Girl
Song lyrics, Blowin' Your Mind! (1967)

Girl, Game, Heart

“Thou warden of the western gate, above Manhattan Bay,
The fogs of doubt that hid thy face are driven clean away:
Thine eyes at last look far and clear, thou liftest high thy hand
To spread the light of liberty world-wide for every land.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

Liberty Enlightening the World (1917)

World, Light

“On the third floor of Manning's Coffee Shop in the Farmer's Market in Seattle confronting the Sound, the windows are opaque with fog. Sitting here in the long deserted room, I feel suspended enveloped by a white silence. Two floors below, the farmers are bending over their long rows of fruit and vegetables; washing and arranging their produce under intense lights shaded by circular green shades. Above, where I sit, the world seems obliterated from all save memory; abstracted without the feeling of being divorced from one’s roots. My eye keeps focusing upon the opaque windows [an equivalent of the picture plane]. Suddenly the vision is disturbed by the shape of a gull floating silently across the width of the window, a line of movement drawn across the picture surface. Then space again. In opposing lines to the gull's flight, the Sound moves northward through the Inland Passage... It is true that trains run daily out of Seattle to points East and South, but my mind takes but little cognizance of this fact. To me Seattle seems pocketed. There is only one way out: Alaska, toward the North! Swerving to the South, there is the Orient, although in San Francisco I feel the Orient rolling in with its tides. My imagination, it would seem, has its own geography.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Source: 1950's, In: Reminiscence and Reverie, 1951, pp. 45, 46

World, Way, Feeling, Imagination

“As the fog was lifting a voice come chanting:
This land was made for you and me.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

This is one of the more variable of the stanzas; other renditions include:
Where the wind is blowing I go a strolling
The wheat field waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog is lifting and the wind is saying:
This land is made for you and me.
The sun comes shining as I was strolling,
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
The fog was lifting as a voice come chanting:
This land was made for you and me.
This Land Is Your Land (1940; 1944)
Context: When the sun came shining as I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice come chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

“"Fog.. So very.."
"Do you like fog"
She used the ancient, long-forgotten "thou" — the "thou" of the master to the slave. It entered into me slowly, sharply. Yes, I was a slave, and this, too, was necessary, was good.
"Yes, good.." I said aloud to myself. And then to her," I hate fog. I am afraid of it."
"That means you love it. You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it: you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved."”

Yevgeny Zamyatin book We

D-503 and I-330
We (1921)

Love, Hate

“All men are stuck in a kind of fog. They're surrounded by a wall of fog. They think this is perfectly normal, but it's not.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Black Room (1975), p. 20
Context: All men are stuck in a kind of fog. They're surrounded by a wall of fog. They think this is perfectly normal, but it's not. It means that since they can't see much beyond their own little situation, they tend to vegetate. They need some immediate stimulus to keep them alert.

Men, Thinking

“Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"I Think of Those Who Were Truly Great"
Poems (1933)
Context: What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Flowers

“To be sure, they sometimes do bad things, but the movie understands them and their flaws. Like great fiction, House of Sand and Fog sees into the hearts of its characters, and loves and pities them.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/house-of-sand-and-fog-2003 of House of Sand and Fog (26 December 2003) <br class="br">Reviews, Four star reviews <br class="br">Context: It's so rare to find a movie that doesn't take sides. Conflict is said to be the basis of popular fiction, and yet here is a film that seizes us with its first scene and never lets go, and we feel sympathy all the way through for everyone in it. To be sure, they sometimes do bad things, but the movie understands them and their flaws. Like great fiction, House of Sand and Fog sees into the hearts of its characters, and loves and pities them. … "House of Sand and Fog" relates not a plot with its contrived ups and downs but a story. A plot is about things that happen. A story is about people who behave.<br>To admire a story you must be willing to listen to the people and observe them, and at the end of House of Sand and Fog, we have seen good people with good intentions who have their lives destroyed because they had the bad luck to come across a weak person with shabby desires.

Love, Understanding, Heart, Housing

“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.”

Stephen Crane book The Red Badge of Courage

Source: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ch. 1 First lines.
Context: The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors.

“There is an obligation resting on us all to dedicate our minds to the hard task of thinking in terms of Christian objectives and values, so that we may be saved from moral confusion.
For never, probably, has there been a time when there was a more vigorous effort to surround social and international questions with such a fog of distortion and prejudices and hysterical appeal to fear.”

Halford E. Luccock (1885–1960) American Methodist minister

Keeping Life Out of Confusion (1938)
Context: When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled "made in Germany"; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, "Americanism." … The high-sounding phrase "the American way" will be used by interested groups intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, teargas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties … There is an obligation resting on us all to dedicate our minds to the hard task of thinking in terms of Christian objectives and values, so that we may be saved from moral confusion.
For never, probably, has there been a time when there was a more vigorous effort to surround social and international questions with such a fog of distortion and prejudices and hysterical appeal to fear. We have touched a new low in a Congressional investigation this Summer, used by some participating in it to whip up fear and prejudice against many causes of human welfare, such as concern for peace and the rights of labor to bargain collectively.

Fear, Question, Thinking, Effort

“If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one's outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

Journal entry (26 August 1938); later published in The Wartime Journals (1970)
Context: The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one's outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?

Life, Men, Way, Error

“Just like a feeling that you're sending out,
I pick it up.
But I can't let you go.
If I let you go,
You slip into the fog…”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Source: Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

“The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air.”

Clifford D. Simak book Cemetery World

Cemetery World (1973)
Context: The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to camp. But I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.

Tree, Sun

“A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on. There is new ground to be broken, and new action to be taken. There are times when the future seems thick as a fog; you sit and wait, hoping the mists will lift and reveal the right path. But this is a time when the future seems a door you can walk right through into a room called tomorrow.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

Inaugural Address (1989)
Context: I come before you and assume the Presidency at a moment rich with promise. We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better. For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on. There is new ground to be broken, and new action to be taken. There are times when the future seems thick as a fog; you sit and wait, hoping the mists will lift and reveal the right path. But this is a time when the future seems a door you can walk right through into a room called tomorrow.
Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom. Men and women of the world move toward free markets through the door to prosperity. The people of the world agitate for free expression and free thought through the door to the moral and intellectual satisfactions that only liberty allows.
We know what works: Freedom works. We know what's right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.

Hope, Freedom, Time, Waiting

“War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction
Context: War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies. If they were only used to deceive the enemy in the game of war it would not be worth troubling about. But, as the purpose of most of them is to fan indignation and induce the flower of the country's youth to be ready to make the supreme sacrifice, it becomes a serious matter. Exposure, therefore, may be useful, even when the struggle is over, in order to show up the fraud, hypocrisy, and humbug on which all war rests, and the blatant and vulgar devices which have been used for so long to prevent the poor ignorant people from realizing the true meaning of war.

War, Truth, Fear

“The sensuous may be exceedingly distinct, while intellectual concepts are extremely confused. The former we observe in the prototype of sensuous knowledge geometry; the latter, in the organon of all intellectual concepts, metaphysics. It is evident how much toil the latter is expending to dispel the fogs of confusion darkening the common intellect, though not always with the happy success of the former science.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section II On The Distinction Between The Sensible And The Intelligible Generally

Happiness, Knowledge, Science, Success

“Desire, she realized, was a thick fog that could completely obscure reality.”

Steve Perry (1947) American writer

Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 6

Reality

“Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it…or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.
Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 12, A Special Delivery, II

Hate, Pleasure, Way, Imagination

“The mystery surrounding Garbo was as thick as a London fog.”

Greta Garbo (1905–1990) Swedish-American actress

Tallulah Bankhead, Tallulah: My Autobiography (1952), ch. 9, p. 172: Duels with the Screen

“If desires fly by like shadows,
If vows are empty words,
Is it worth it to live in this fog of delusion?
Is it worth it to live if the truth is dead?
is it worth when life’s summer grows to winter?
Then it is to know what love is,
waiting on a foreign shore.”

Alexis Karpouzos book BEYOND THE HEAVEN

Love, Life, Truth, Winter

Quotes about fog page 2

Quotes about fog
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